Embodiments of the present invention are related to application development and deployment and, in particular, to extensible customization migration via pluggable interface.
Software as a service (SaaS) is an increasingly popular software model, where customers can purchase subscriptions to use applications that are hosted centrally (e.g., in a cloud computing environment). Like traditional software applications, there is demand by customers to customize SaaS applications to their own particular needs. For example, a business customer may customize the appearance of the applications, add or remove functionality, change security settings, etc. to suit their particular needs.
Software customizations can be created and tested in a development environment prior to deployment. Migration tools can be used to move software applications between development and deployment environments. However, traditional migration tools are technology specific, which can require customers to maintain and be familiar with several different migration tools to support their software applications. Additionally, migration tools typically require knowledge of many disparate underlying technologies to ensure that the software applications are correctly and completely migrated. Further, SaaS customers do not typically have access to the underlying interfaces and tools needed to migrate applications, requiring the customer to wait for the SaaS provider's technical support to deploy their customized applications.